Browsed byMonth: September 2018

Everyone has seen those phone apps that make your photos look like the style of a famous painting. It is often called transferring artistic style. Code is easily available for you to write one yourself. Freshman in Stanford CS 231n do this today using neural nets.

Autonomous cars are getting all the press, but there is an even more disruptive side to self-driving vehicles that will almost certainly come first – autonomous farming.

Imagine running a farm completely from your study? Sending fleets of tractors and harvesters to work 24-7 without a single human setting foot in the field. They can be timed to plant, harvest, or plow when conditions are optimal. Be monitored remotely by camera and even be driven remotely.

They could be combined with small drones or robots that are able to do fine labor – like weeding without damaging the plants and using a minimal amount of chemicals:

This isn’t just about reducing labor efforts – it’s actually a potentially huge jump in productivity and capital outlay as well. Imagine fields that can be analyzed and automatically planted based on market conditions, soil conditions – all to maximize profit and production.

It could radically reduce costs and environmental impact of chemicals used to feed, weed, and protect by insecticides. Imagine a machine that could drive over a field – targetting weeds and plants and give it exactly the right amount of insecticides, feed, and weed killer on an individual level.

This technology is not science fiction – it’s here in prototypes now. It should become ubiquitous in the next decade or two. Here’s a good overview of what’s coming and already in development

Filmmakers Robin Pogorzelski and Simon Bourrat were in Nepal working on the documentary “Everest Green” and shot this short film in their free time. It’s packed with beautifully lit and composed vignettes – truly beautiful and worth a watch.

I’ve posted numerous research papers that show how easy it is to make videos do what you’d like. How to take snippets of voices and make people say whatever you’d like. We can even now make people do dances on video they can’t do in real life. How easy is this to do? Deep fakes are shockingly easy as it turns out and only needs a few savy folks to make one.

Here’s the latest example where former US president Obama is made to say whatever the actor behind them wants.

Here’s a little video clip from the afternoon that turned really windy. View was very obstructed due to all the smoke from wildfires. Air quality was actually listed as hazardous – so I didn’t get out much this day.

The National Museums Liverpool has some great videos. One set of them involved getting dressed in 18th century garb. We’ve all seen period movies. Now you can see how actors, and the original nobelmen/women of that era dressed.

Here’s what men wore and how they dressed:

Now, if you thought getting dressed as a 18th century gentleman was complex. Try being a 18th century lady. Bonus points for explaining the old nursery rhyme ‘Lucy Locket lost her pocket’, but others suggest it had a more tawdry meaning.